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Behind The Scenes In Google’s Battle Against Bad Ads

When new employees join the Google ad quality team that manually reviews suspect ads, they start by studying internal documentation of policies that outline examples of ads that would be approved, and those that would be rejected. Then the employees’ skills are tested on ads that don’t run, they graduate to ads that get little traffic, and finally they move up to ads expected to get lots of impressions. These are some of the tidbits revealed by Google director of engineering for the advertising team, David W. Baker, in a wide-ranging conversation this week.

Toward More Transparency

“I have been talking with my peers in different departments for about a year now about how I think Google has been remiss about being transparent about what we do,” said Baker. “There has been a fear that if we talk about these bad things it’ll draw attention to the negative.” Baker said the new communication is aimed at reassuring end users and advertisers about the measures the company takes to deliver quality ads.

The company is in a difficult position in a couple of different ways. If it cracks down too hard and takes too long to review ads, or rejects good ads, Google gets grief from white-hat advertisers. When bad ads slip through, it’s accused of a conflict of interest — because it ostensibly profits when ads run, even if they’re bad. “It’s an interesting position to be in,” Baker told me.

Bad Ads = Lower Revenue?

“Ultimately this [ad quality] I believe is Google’s biggest opportunity for increasing our revenue,” Baker confided, saying he believes that many users distrust Google ads and therefore don’t click on them. “That makes me very sad,” he said. If the company can gain that trust, it will result in more clicks, and more revenue for Google and for its advertisers, Baker says.

Ad Review

Ads — along with their individual landing pages — go through two levels of automated/technological review. If an ad fails the first level, it’s disapproved. Some are flagged for further review and are tagged as “Under Review.” If the ad and landing page pass, the ad becomes “Eligible” and begins to serve on Google.com to users with safe search turned off.

Then, there’s a second level of review for ads in the last couple of categories. If the automated system is confident it’s judging the ad accurately, it will either approve the ad for distribution to everyone (“Approved”), approve the ad for certain users in certain locations (“Approved – Limited”), or reject it (“Disapproved”). If the technological system can’t come to a determination, it goes to a real person — who undergoes extensive and ongoing training — to make a final decision. All human decisions are fed back into the machine-learning system to make it “smarter.”

Site Review

The site review system looks at all sites across all ads from all advertisers and regularly crawls them. The company uses machine learning models and a rules engine to analyze the database of collected information, trying to determine whether a site abides, or doesn’t abide, by Google’s policies.

“The challenge is that we get these constant variations where the bad sites are trying to change how they look but still achieve their objective — to make it clear to the user about illicit goods they’re providing, or, in the case of counterfeit sites, make it look like they are authorized to offer the goods,” Baker said.

If a site is determined to be in violation, it’s disabled, and any ads leading to that site are disapproved. If the automated system can’t be confident about a decision, it goes to a real person.

Account Review

The account review system looks at patterns in the account as a whole to determine whether it should be investigated further and shut down. The system looks at things like ads and keywords, budget changes, the advertiser’s address and phone number, the advertiser’s IP address, disabled sites connected to the account, and disapproved ads.

This is continually ongoing and incorporates new data as it comes in. If the automated system is confident the advertiser is up to no good, the account will automatically be suspended. If not, a real person will decide.

A Never-Ending Battle

And, yet, bad ads continue to slip through, and Google is still accused of not working hard enough to catch the bad guys.

“This is a constant battle, and we are constantly revising the systems that we’ve built,” Baker said. “This is just a huge problem of scale. There is a tremendous cost to us for making any small error…. also, shutting down a good advertiser can have a cost, as well, in damaging a relationship.”

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About The Author

Pamela Parker is Executive Features Editor at Search Engine Land and Marketing Land. She’s a well-respected authority on digital marketing, having reported and written on the subject since 1998. She's a former managing editor of ClickZ, and worked on the business side helping independent publishers monetize their sites at Federated Media Publishing.

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http://twitter.com/Jehochman Jonathan Hochman

…and Great Article! It’s good to hear that Google is being more open about ad quality control. We definitely don’t want our branded ads appears next to crud, nor do we want to have to compete against scam ads. Scams have nearly 100% profit margin. Legitimate businesses have a hard time competing against that.

http://profile.yahoo.com/VSWO6B6RJSZ27V4ONHA5QFI2YA Therese

This is great news, sadly some little inline communities are getting affected every now and then. But this is a great idea which Google implemented.

http://twitter.com/seopeace SEO Peace

It’s very unfortunate that Google is doing a lot of struggle against bad adds, However, we are sure
Google will solve out this issue also and will come with a user friendly platform which will satisfy the users.

Pat Grady

sometimes, it’s not the ad that’s bad, but the person running it. gee G, why do you give affiliate domain name poachers preferred treatment via account CTR history… you can see them bidding on aff links, on domain names of stores everywhere… their PPC isn’t superior, but your QS algo treats them like they’re doing great things, and that’s all on you. wise up, you’re being myopic about the ecosystem you live in. you make webmasters verify their sites to use WMT, but not AdWords… with your pinkie toenail, you could clean up a huge swath of the swamp you’ve created, instead, we each take a drinking straw to our lil square inch, and slurp it up today, to find it wet again tomorrow. motivation hint: G, you’ll make tons more by allowing this piece of attribution to be properly channeled. hint2: the majority of tm submits you get are for this, not actual tm infringements. seriously, see define:stewardship.

http://profile.yahoo.com/U364AMDPSKHLBQCCJX5LVZQK5Q Aline

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http://www.microsourcing.com/ MicroSourcing

Bad ads discourage a lot of site owners from following tried and tested ways of ranking high in the search results. It gives site owners the impression that they can make use of paid ads to get traffic and visibility instead of optimizing their pages.